Tag: sperm

Sophie Bushwick (Twitter, Tumblr) is a science journalist and podcaster, and is currently an intern at DISCOVERmagazine.com. She has written for Scientific American, io9, and DISCOVER, and has produced podcasts for 60-Second Science and Physics Central.

Renowned biologist Elizabeth Blackburn has said that when she was a young post-doc, “Telomeres just grabbed me and kept leading me on.” And lead her on they did—all the way to the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2009. Telomeres are DNA sequences that continue to fascinate researchers and the public, partially because people with longer telomeres tend to live longer. So the recent finding that older men father offspring with unusually lengthy telomeres sounds like great news. Men of advanced age will give their children the gift of longer lives—right? But as is so often the case in biology, things aren’t that simple, and having an old father may not be an easy route to a long and healthy life.

Every time a piece of DNA gets copied, it can end up with errors in its sequence, or mutations. One of the most frequent changes is losing scraps of information from each end of the strand. Luckily, these strands are capped with telomeres, repeating sequences that do not code for any proteins and serve only to protect the rest of the DNA. Each time the DNA makes a copy, its telomeres get shorter, until these protective ends wear away to nothing. Without telomeres, the DNA cannot make any more copies, and the cell containing it will die.

But sperm are not subject to this telomere-shortening effect. In fact, the telomeres in sperm-producing stem cells not only resist degrading, they actually grow. This may be thanks to a high concentration of the telomere-repairing enzyme telomerase in the testicles; researchers are still uncertain. All they know is that the older the man, the longer the telomeres in his sperm will be.